


Flip Turn

by luckybarton



Category: Gattaca (1997)
Genre: Ableism, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Canon Disabled Character, Depression, Emotional Manipulation, Gen, Jerome Eugene Morrow - Centric, Pre-Canon, Rehabilitation, Resentment, Suicide Attempt, Swimming, Yuletide 2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 10:36:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17021070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luckybarton/pseuds/luckybarton
Summary: The water is always colder than it looks, but sometimes you have to swim anyway.





	Flip Turn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wilde_stallyn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wilde_stallyn/gifts).



There are some things you learn only when swimming becomes your life and your life becomes the water. The way the gritty floor feels against the soles of your feet, when you're warming up and when you're leaving. That your coaches were right all along: the fastest way to get used to the cold is to push past your fear and just dive. Which stroke, out of four bad choices, is your favourite. How much you loathe the 400 IM.

_ Butterfly-backstroke-breaststroke-freestyle. Butterfly-backstroke-breaststroke-freestyle. _

Some of these things are easy to learn. Others are excruciatingly difficult. Once you know them, though, they’re impossible to forget.

Starting from the point where he got over the flailing-and-drowning stage and began to drown and flail in a more practiced way, Jerome had always been partial to the fly.  When he'd relayed his coach's feedback on his skill—which seemed to be preternatural—to his parents, they had been pleased. It was a nice addition to the “how we chose Jerome's genes” story, which he had long expected them to stop trotting out. It was unusual to talk about it when your child was older than four or so; but then, he supposed, that was the age when most children became disappointments. Few of such stories had been so fruitful as his.

“You know how you could never run as a child,” his mother had said. Smiling, across the kitchen table, the conversation not really between the two of them but his parents' visitors. “We had to get that knee brace. Of course you remember.”

“How could I forget?” Jerome asked, and returned her smile thinly. The Visitors nodded. He wished they would leave.

“But you can run now,” one of them stated. He hadn't bothered with her name. Macready-something.

“No. Of course not,” he had replied. “My knees bend backwards. That's where the last few points went.”

“Isn't that,” she'd said, faltering, “against, uh...”

“Regulations? No,” Jerome said, finishing the question for her. “Within the normal human range. They chose it for me.”

“We knew it would make him a good swimmer,” his mother continued.

Jerome nodded. “But I'm not just a good swimmer. I'm the best.”

 

Strictly speaking, freestyle is not a stroke. The front crawl is, and is what people normally think of as freestyle. In reality, it can be any stroke—but, in practice, front crawl wins the race.

Sometimes, pettily, Jerome swam  _ butterfly-backstroke-breaststroke-butterfly, _ just to see his coach react. Like most of his vices, it was technically legal. Swimming fly in free. Spending as much time on dry land as possible somewhere on the scale between slightly buzzed and completely blasted. He rarely showed up to practice drunk—it affected his times—but evenings with no practice were fair game. Evenings after practice, too: as soon as he possibly could.

Spending the night before a competition nursing a bottle of rum didn’t seem as risky while he was doing it.

_ Should have known they'd notice. All comps take piss. _

It was a regional event. Not a big one, but one that would have,  _ should have _ led him to nationals. He was barred from that competition, which stung—then barred from  _ competition _ for a year, which hurt a lot more.

Quietly, he was packed off to one rehab, where some counsellor who was off her tits herself tried to instruct them in  _ self-love _ and  _ emotional healing _ and had them ride horses for a bit. Then another, after he got back and promptly cracked open his stash of shite vodka. A month in the woods getting athlete's foot and rained on.

He returned to the pool and pretended that nothing had ever changed. Watched his times inch back up to something close to what they were before. Tried not to dwell on what the rest of his team might know, might think.

His father cornered him after a particularly miserable practice to give what Jerome supposed he thought amounted to a pep talk. “We gave you everything you needed to be happy. It's all  _ in you. _ And you're squandering it. You can never let yourself turn into a—”

“There are other things I could do,” Jerome said, snapping at him. “I could do anything with this quotient. I could go to _space_ if I wanted. So _go fuck yourself,_ and don't _fucking_ _insinuate_ that I could ever be one of _them_.”

“A junkie,” his father said. “A junkie with a  _ ten _ would still be a junkie.”

“You made me,” Jerome hissed. 

His father glared. “We gave you the best. The rest is just you.”

 

The next year, he reached the finals of the same competition he’d been ejected from the year before. Sober, with both pride and resent. He stood on the block, then knelt into starting position. The countdown. The buzzer. The dive. The water rushing over him.  _ This _ was what he was meant to do.

He forged ahead. Arms over the water, then slicing back through. Motion forward. Rarely breathing.

_ His lungs are bigger. His feet, too. _ His mother smiling. The wet seeping into his boots, three days into the forest.

_ What you had before, you can't get back. _ When he started swimming, it made him feel better than anything else. 

_ This is what he was meant to do. _

He slammed into the bulkhead hard at the end of the race, skull meeting plastic and sending shockwaves through his skull. Once the pain had subsided, he looked up to the board.

He'd come in second. His team still applauded, but Jerome just wanted to sink into a wall—better yet, the bottom of the pool.  _ He’d lie against the tiles. Watch his breath bubble up through the surface. Never, ever come up. _

“You've got a limited time to make it, kid,” was all his coach had to say. “Even with all the genes you can buy, you've only got so many chances.” 

“Everything you don't achieve is on you,” had been the final answer from his parents. 

“Am I not a good enough return on your investment?” he'd shouted. “Am I not good enough?” He already knew the answer. He'd  _ seen _ the charts. His potential was higher than his peak. He stormed out at the end of that argument. Slammed the door. The road outside looked beckoning.

Nobody would know it wasn't an accident.

_ The only way to do it is to just dive in. _

 

By the time the sirens reached Jerome, he was slipping in and out of consciousness, frantic bystanders yelling over him. Desperately trying to help, all of them. He hoped he was beyond it.

He woke up unpleasantly, surrounded by bright lights and aggravating hospital machinery. It wasn't unlike the first part of his first go-around with rehab, but plus his parents softly sobbing in the same room as him instead of back home on their sofa. They only went away when the doctors forced them to.

“I’m not going to answer,” he told them. “Not going to.” That resolve didn’t last very long.

“Had you been drinking?” one of them asked.

Jerome did the best he could to glare at him with his neck fixed in place. “Wish I had.” In fact, that seemed like a good idea. He had plans for when he got out.

“So you meant to step into the road,” the doctor continued.

“I meant to cross it,” Jerome said.

The doctor folded his arms. “Mr. Morrow, impulsivity is in your profile. Along with your predisposition to depression and history with addiction, I hardly need your confirmation.”

How dare he. How  _ dare _ he. “I don’t have any of those.”

“Cheap gene-therapists treat them as universal bad traits, completely ignoring that the gene quotient works on clusters. The idea being that if you are  _ properly informed _ of your predispositions, you can avoid their negative outcomes.”

Jerome snorted. “My parents are anything but cheap.”

 

You can't have the ability without the drive. You can't have the drive without the flaws. The ability and the flaws together is considered a positive in the gene quotient, and the higher bounds of the gene quotient are only accessible through this. Whether by luck or design, the people with the highest quotients don’t just have positive traits but positive clusters.

Jerome travelled to America on his blood. The wheelchair, he said, was to rest from a sports injury—that he'd be healed in no time. Customs took him at his word. Nobody else did. He never even got to the stage where someone would check his quotient; never past the part of the interview where he'd wind up in a physical meeting. If they ever did check without letting him know, it wasn't enough to change their opinion.

It was in that time that he met the man who would sell his genes to the first acceptable bidder. Then the first acceptable bidder—one Vincent Freeman, who had the right blood type but looked nothing like him at all. They fixed the basics: hair, eye colour. His height had been the larger issue, and Vincent spent weeks in a brace on the floor—Jerome’s floor. It was a period of time where neither of them had anything better to do than ignore each other, though Vincent hardly respected the silence.

“You don't go anywhere,” Vincent said.

“You go even less places,” Jerome replied, pointedly. “And last I checked, the shops counted as ‘anywhere’. So you can piss off.”

“You don't go anywhere that isn't the store,” Vincent rephrased.

“I'll roll over your toes.”

“Eugene.”

Jerome pivoted to glare at Vincent more directly. “They call you a ‘borrowed ladder’. What do you think that makes me?”

“You still  _ have _ the ladder. They can’t pull me down from space.”

“You don’t get it, do you?”

“What  _ is _ there to get?”

“If I could use my bloody ladder, I wouldn’t lend it to you.”

Vincent winced. “That wasn’t supposed to be a legs joke.”

“I didn’t think it was,” Jerome paused, anger rising in his throat. “They make programmes about people like me, you know. For the rest of you to watch and pity.”

“They make shows about people like me, too, Eugene.”

“So you understand, then,” Jerome deadpanned.

Vincent stared upwards. “Maybe I don’t.”

“No,” Jerome said. “I don't think you can.”

 

The next day, he headed out, letting Vincent make assumptions about where he’d gone. It took nearly half an hour to reach his destination, and he suspected it would take longer to get back. His swimming trunks had remained in the bowels of a suitcase since the ‘accident’ he’d accidentally survived, and taking them out had prompted an array of emotions that he made best efforts to shove away.

He got into the leisure complex with blood and a severe amount of arguing. He hadn’t even known they’d have the equipment to test him. The fuckers. 

He got into the water with some amount of difficulty, feeling both incredibly light and incredibly heavy. It was draining to even complete a twenty-five metre length. He felt destroyed. He felt successful. He heard his coach. He heard his parents.

He remembered his love for the water, and his hate for it.

He left, and never mentioned where he’d been.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for Yuletide 2018, my first time participating in that particular exchange. It's also my first time writing in this fandom, though Gattaca is one of my favourite movies of all time and I have read some fic for it. So, overall, this fic is a lot of firsts.
> 
> I'm also really happy to have matched with wilde_stallyn, who wrote a really interesting prompt that I hope I've done justice to. Thank you for being my recipient!


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